


take these hands (they will not shake)

by MashpotatoeQueen5



Series: let's visit our own graves and call it mourning [2]
Category: 6 Underground (2019)
Genre: (probably), Allusion to Minor Character Off Screen Rape, BAMF Women, Backstory, Because Five wasn't GIVEN ONE GRRRRR, Childhood, Choices, Complicated Relationships, Doctors & Physicians, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Families of Choice, Family Issues, Feminist Themes, Five | Amelia (6 UnderGround) is BAMF, Gen, Growing Up, Introspection, Life - Freeform, Look At Your Life Look At Your Choices, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Procedures, Missing Scene, Poverty, Unconventional Families, Women Being Awesome, but it's blink and you'll miss it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:35:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22538659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MashpotatoeQueen5/pseuds/MashpotatoeQueen5
Summary: We know precious few things about Five. We know that she looks good in green, that she speaks Spanish, that she used to be a doctor. We know that she joined a cause that had her give up everything.We don't know why.(This is a story to fill in the gaps, before and after and in between.)
Series: let's visit our own graves and call it mourning [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1621720
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	take these hands (they will not shake)

**Author's Note:**

> I had this half written with deleted scraps from my *the dead do not weep* story, and I figured I could just finish it up and post it here. Enjoy!
> 
> (Also, the actress who plays Five is Puerto Rican, so I have Amelia's parents as immigrants from Puerto Rica and her as a natural born American citizen. No idea if this is movie canon, but that's the way I chose to write it.)
> 
> WARNINGS: In case you missed the tags, there is a blink and you'll miss it allusion to rape and suicide in this fic. It's to a minor character, and it's literally a sentence, but if this sort of thing hurts you please be gentle with yourself.

Five is born into a household with two sisters who love to wreak havoc and an older brother who is just as bad. Her father spends most days working odd shifts to keep them getting by. Her mother… isn't around. She hasn't been for a while.

 _Five_ studies and works hard. She gets good grades and takes up shifts in the local grocery store to help them all by. She cooks dinner and cleans up the house and puts her siblings to bed. 

She puts herself to bed, too. Tucks herself in and breathes deep, counting her sibling’s rising and falling chests and thinking _alive alive alive._

Her father comes home some nights, presses chapped lips to her forehead in the softest embrace of the universe. _Thank you,_ he murmurs in their mother tongue, _you are a woman of beauty, woman of bravery, woman of strength. You are watched over. You are blessed._

Some nights. 

And Five lays there in that quiet moving dark and lets it happen, eyes closed and face slack, unwilling to look at those battered tired orbs so like her own.

Here is a truth about life that everyone knows:

_You do not get to choose._

_You do not get to choose where you are from, the colour of your skin, your sex, your family, your socioeconomic status. You do not get to choose the curve of your cheeks and the strength in your fingers. You do not get to choose your tiny baby giggles, the colour of your eyes, the strength of your spirit._

_You do not get to choose who you are, when you are born. You come into this world breathing (or not) and life goes on and on and on._

_You do not get to choose. You just are._

(Here is a truth about life that everyone forgets: _You get to choose who you_ become _.)_

Five breathes in her own existence.

She does not feel like a woman. She feels like a child: fourteen and gangly and covered in pimples and scars. Her fingers are wrinkled from washing dishes and her feet are sore from being stood on all day. She is growing into herself and she is hardly grown.

She does not feel brave, nor strong. She feels scared. Scared for the future. Scared for her family. She is insecure and she is burdened and she does not want this weight of responsibility on her small narrow shoulders. She does not want to be mother and sister in one.

Some nights her father comes in and whispers a universe onto her skin. Some nights he doesn’t come home at all.

Five does not feel watched over. She feels alone.

He calls her blessed, beautiful.

She feels _poor-_ betrayed by a life she should have gotten. 

She is good, you see? _Good._ She does her chores and she takes care of her siblings and she works hard in school and home and all her life.

There is something building in her chest. Something like anger. Something like _rage_ . She tries not to feel resentful, she tries, she _does,_ but-

Where is the pay off? Where is her happy ending? Good people should get happy endings, that is what everyone says. If you work hard enough, if you are kind enough, good enough, then you will be rewarded. And _yet-_

And yet here she is. Young exhausted growing bones, whispered praises that cannot hold, and the shattered beginnings of a truth whispering _life is not fair, it is not fair, it is not f a i r_ deep within her aching breaking chest.

It makes her want to weep. It makes her want to scream. It makes her hands want to shake.

They don’t.

Five breathes. She breathes early mornings and she breathes late nights and she breathes it all in, pain and burdens and responsibilities and all.

She does not feel _blessed._

_This is a society and it is built on things that should be broken._

_Five walks- she walks all the long short years of her life and she aches with it, breaks with it, builds herself back up._

_This is what it is to be born a woman of colour: you are at war the moment you are born kicking and screaming into this world._

_It is not a war with bombs. It is not a war with explosives and violence and threats- although it can be. But most often is a silent war: it implodes underneath your skin with a thousand passing comments, drags you down into the deep depths of the ocean and expects you to swim anchored and bound._

_Nothing is safe. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is fair. Children should not have to be caretakers just because they are girls. They should not have to work three times as hard just to prove they are human and deserve to be treated as such._

_Five walks and she fights and it boils deep inside of her, because there is a choice, there is always a choice, but no one said it would ever be easy._

_Because there is a choice, and every day she walks and she comes across people choosing wrong._

_Because people who are white and male will always get better choices than the little girl who is at war for her own right to existence._

Five drags herself through college by the grit of her teeth, saves money and skips meals. She drags herself through medical school and collects loans and knowledge alike, works three jobs and collects meager dollars to send back to her family.

She does not make friends. Friends are a distraction, a burden, someone else you have to carry on this long and lonely road best walked alone. She already has the weight of one family on her back- she can only shoulder so much.

But she reads, she walks through her days with eyes tired, battered, and _open._

She sees so many things. She sees people who judge and people who break and people who have so many scars deep inside their chests they can not breathe around the tissue. She sees war and poverty and hate, racism and sexism and a thousand little things that scream at her _life is not fair, life is not fair, life is not f a i r-_

She breathes it all in and clasps her hands tight so they will not shake.

When her male colleagues smirk at her, ask for a drink, ask for a dance. She smiles- all teeth and anger- and wonders if they can see the danger. When people raise eyebrows at her accent or spit slurs with ignorant mouths and ignorant minds, she stands straight backed and stubborn and terrible in her own might.

She has been at war all her life. Her walls are titanium. 

She will not crumble.

_Do you want to know the truth about little girls who grow tall under the weight of a world so keen on crushing them?_

_They are terrifying._

_They are not sweet, they are not precious, they are not gentle._

_They are not yours._

_Little girls are young woman, growing into themselves and hardly grown. Their smiles are not gifts: they are warning signs. Look them in the eyes and see the peril._

_They are always more than the things that have broken them, always more than the crevices they crawled their way out of. They are here, human and aching and alive, so much more than simply wives and daughters: they are creators and workers and heroes unto themselves._

_They do not need you to save them. They saved themselves, again and again and again, every time they breathe and step forwards in a life that tells them they can not get anywhere worthy of their own existence._

_Existence is worth, in and of itself._

_Or did you forget?_

Five is a doctor, and a good one, too. She could have had a long and successful career.

Except for one thing: doctors don’t get to choose their patients in the emergency room. 

Ever think about that?

Twenty people enter a hospital and all of them are nearly dying. One of the incoming patients is a man who shot nineteen of them. 

People are just sacks of blood and bone and sweat, when they enter the emergency room. A body to be operated on, a body to save. They do not have wives and husbands, children and jobs. They are the work to be done. And medical personnel get to it.

Doctors do not get to choose who they save, do not get to alter the cruel coin flip of fate that determines who lives and dies.

Twenty people enter a hospital and all of them are nearly dying. Seven of them come out of the emergency room still breathing, and one of them is the murderer who tried so hard to kill them all in the first place.

_(Blood and bones and sweat, if only it were that simple-)_

Five, who is a doctor, can’t stop thinking about it. She does not get to choose, but throughout the whole operation she thinks to that dying murderer of a man, _I have to save you and I hate it, I hate it, I hate it-_

She stitches him up. She saves him. She does her job. 

It makes bile rise up in her throat. It makes her hands want to shake.

They don’t.

She is a doctor, and a good one, too, except sometimes she thinks _what if I simply don’t try so hard next time, what if the next time scum from the face of the earth comes across my table a little mistake happens, just one little mistake, and they never ever get the chance to hurt anyone ever again._

_What if, what if, what if-_

One offers her a choice. The choice says she gets to choose.

She chooses.

_One looks at her with eyes that have seen too much and a heart that bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. He looks at her, and tells her with a voice that is knowing and angry and human to ‘take a box.’_

_Take a box, fill it up with everything you hate in the world._

_Grieve over it. Rage. Pour that heavy blasted thing from your heart and throw it over the highest mountain you can climb,hear the way it clangs and breaks and fractures and never, ever forget._

_And Five does._

_She puts her anger, her resentment, her childhood of closed eyes and whispered universes that should have been shouted, embraced,_ loved. _She puts cat calls and racial slurs and her aching feet. She presses a silent war that has stretched a lifetime and all the people she should not have had to save, all the people she did who were not worthy of it._

_She puts a woman who must have been her age, once, who was hoping for a better life, who was beautiful, who was treated as less than human and then could not live with the violation, who instead chose to be drowned by life’s murky depths._

_(Fourteen year old's should not have to be mothers. Mothers should not have to feel so broken they choose to feel nothing at all.)_

_All the things that make her hands want to shake. All the reasons they don’t._

_She takes a box and fills it with all her shattered choices and broken grieving moments, and afterwards, it's as if she can breathe a little easier._

_She chooses who she will become in this moment, unburdened from all the things she once was, all the things people labeled her._

_She chooses._

Five joins a cause of her own volition, fakes her death and leaves a family behind. A family who loved her, who she loved. A family that asked for too much for too long and so very rarely let her feel young.

She does not resent them. But she resents.

It doesn’t matter. She is her own warrior, survivor. She is terrible in her own might, unflinching and unbreaking and here. There is danger hiding beneath her eyes. There is a warning sign in her smile that is all teeth.

She is not the world’s. She is _hers_.

There is a silent war raging under her skin. It has been there all her life.

And yet- 

She is grown and she is growing still, into these facets of herself she has yet to become. There is a cause and she is a part of it.

Existence is so much more than fighting, or it should be. Not everyone gets that chance. Not everyone gets the opportunity to learn how to smile gentle and kind. Not everyone gets a shot at living.

But she finds herself getting to know them. She finds herself embracing hands to hold. When you are nothing more than a ghost, there is no weight to carry, just people to walk alongside, people to love when the rest of the world tries so hard to crush you. 

And she does. Love them.

This is a _choice._

_And it is hers._

And later, later, Five will think about that. About how she carved herself into the hollows of these people committed to a cause, these sacks of blood and bones and sweat. She thinks of how they have killed, how they have murdered in cold blood and done it without flinching. There is blood on their hands and in their veins. They are only good because they are chasing after those who have done worse. 

She has made a family of her very own out of murderers and thieves and lost causes. If they came to her operating table- and they have too many times- she would still save them. 

On her worst nights, she wonders what makes them different. If the men and women they gunned down had wives and husbands, children and jobs. She wonders if she had gotten to know them, if she would have been more willing to save them, less filled with righteous hate.

Doctors don’t get to think about these kinds of things. 

But she is no longer a doctor.

Do you want a narrow shaking truth about life? Here it is:

_Life is not fair. It is not kind. It is a broken hollow thing and it swallows you whole, uncaring that you worlds to live for yet, that you are a wife, a husband, a child._

_L i f e_ _i s n o t f a i r_ .

_Do not expect it to be._

_But it_ is _here. You are blood and bones and sweat and_ living, _still._

_You are human._

_There will be wars all your life, aching shaking things that will try and crush you into nothing at all. You will always have boxes filled with things that curdle rage deep inside your chest, that make you weep, that leave you lost._

_But there will also so often be chances to grow into yourself, opportunities to laugh, to embrace, to love._

_There will be choices, even here, even now._

_There is something beautiful in being so broken, in being so very human._

_Life is not fair. But it is yours._

_Live it._

Five tilts her head back and breathes in her own existence, early morning sunrises and star-filled late nights. She breathes it all in: pain and responsibilities, joys and blessings and all.

She breathes.

And then she exhales a universe: loud, brilliant, aching.

And _hers._

**Author's Note:**

> I am a white person and I realize that this means I have certain biases, privileges, and gaps in my knowledge. I tried to write this piece- and some of the struggles Latina women go through- as realistically as I could, but if I have messed up anywhere, if there are any suggestions, or if something's bothering them, please feel free to call me out. I am willing to make changes and such to make this a more honest and authentic story. Thank you


End file.
